Earlier this year Torsten Curdt worked out how to get Thunderbird working (sort of) with Address Book.

Robert Coleman thought it might be “interesting to repeat the process with the updated patch and the latest trunk Thunderbird.”

And he has, producing a clear walkthrough of how to do it, complete with the steps and code-snippets he used to compile it.

It still looks pretty complicated to me, although it might be a walk in the park for you.

UPDATE: Or as Stan rightly points out in the comments, you can just grab a Thunderbird 3.0a1 build already compiled with the Address Book patch from Torsten’s site .

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Here’s something you don’t stumble across everyday. Jim Puls is a engineer on the Apple Mail Team (hence a kind of demi-god) and he has a blog!

Given the much-hyped culture of secrecy at Cupertino and much-hyped stories of Steve Jobs’ views about communication with the outside world, anyone who sticks their head above the parapet (NDA or not) is admirable. (See further extended commentary on Apple and blogging here ).

In his latest post , he takes issue with a recent list of scandalous problems in mail.app.

He rates the poster at rtfa.net as “better than most of the trolls you find on anonymous blogs” but has some robust and forthright things to say in Mail.app’s defence.

Jim describes himself as a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, who survived a graduation address from Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser al-Missned and went on to work for the Apple Mail Team (perhaps as a result of the advertisement for Mail Team engineers earlier this year? Perhaps earlier.)

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Remember O’Reilly big hitter Allison Randal and her overflowing inbox?

She’s decided to try stemming the flow with Mail.app and MailTags and Mail Act-on , two of the very best plugins for Apple Mail.

It is interesting to see what she discovers and whether she is hopeful that it will be enough to meet the challenge of her 20,000 email inboxes. Interesting too to ponder whether better tools can beat a cultural problem.

Two things at least are better than she holds out. Emails can be tagged with rules in mail.app, so manual tagging is not the only way to bring some order into your data. And the public beta of MailTags does bring reliable syncing of IMAP tags between more than one Mac.

I think, though, that even the most partisan MailTagger would have to concede her other point. You do need to use a Mac to enjoy the plugin’s benefits.

I wonder if Scott is secretly working away on an Outlook or Thunderbird version?

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Fastmail , my main email server provider, has recently introduced greylisting (Wikipedia ) in an attempt to reduce the amount of spam getting into inboxes.

Greylisting works by initially rejecting email from an unknown mail server. The theory goes that legitimate emails will be resent and are then accepted the second time, whilst spammers won’t bother resending, so their emails are, in effect, blocked.

It’s a noble idea, and in a perfect world would work perfectly.

Over the weekend, the company acknowledged defeat in its attempts to tweak the feature a little. The story is worth retelling. It shows not only a well-intentioned company frustrated by practical realities outside its control but also how sneaky spammers are:

Recently we’ve observed that some spam zombie machines are smarter than others, and do SMTP retrying which means that they bypass greylisting. These machines have been reponsible for a large number of “stock scam” spams that include random text and an attached gif. Between Oct 17 to Oct 20 we were trying out a new greylisting policy that involved taking feedback from the spam scoring system, and re-greylisting systems with an increased delay if they had delivered emails that had been detected as spam by the scoring system. Our testing suggested that this quickly and effectively blocked the zombie machines.

Unfortunately it also blocked a small number of poorly configured real email servers that were being used for forwarding because they would also forward all spam emails, and thus be judged as the source of the spam. This caused some emails to be delayed for many hours or in some cases over a day. We’ve now removed this policy totally. While the concept seems a good idea, unfortunately the small number of incorrectly configured hosts out there mean that this just causes too much of a problem for them.

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CRM4Mac is a contact management interface for Mac OS X which combines Address Book, iCal and Mail into a single interface.

It allows you to capture all the to-dos, events, email, contact information, phone call records and sticky notes on your Mac related to particular individuals, groups or projects.

A new version (3.0) has just been launched. It adds projects as a top-level coordinating category for your information, new filter options to restrict what is displayed in the main window, an update check and the ability to add new contacts, events and mail without using the iApps themselves.

It has also been rebuilt from the ground up to improve speed and stability, replaced its AppleScript foundation with SQL database technology, and improved the consistency of interface behaviour throughout the app.

A screenshot shamelessly stolen from the developer’s web site demonstrates how it works and what a user might gain:

I think that the labels are legible. Top left is a window that displays your Address Book groups, companies or projects. The next pane displays individuals within those categories and the main window then displays the emails, to-dos and so on for that person or group.

Underneath a view of the information for the select contact stands to the left of a preview pane for the main window above.

Is this a good thing? Sadly for the developers, I think that the answer doesn’t depend on the quality of the app itself, but on preconceptions about interface design and workflow. People will either love this idea or hate it before they even use it (or OD4Contact which does something similar).

People like Mike Salsbury, who feels that the integration in Ximian Evolution makes it better than Apple Mail would probably love it. Others, like me, who value the “purity” of working with mail and only mail in one app, with events and only events in another and so on, will be faintly appalled.

To help you make up your own mind, a 30 day demo is available from the developer’s web site . CRM4Mac costs USD 49.95, although the new version is currently being offered at the reduced rate of USD 39 with the coupon code “MacExpo”.

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Steve at InsertTitleBlog.com has produced three screencasts which walk through various things you can do with Quicksilver , which is as Steve says, “an extremely powerful productivity app for Mac OS X”.

Quicksilver gets a lot of good press in the blogosphere and deservedly so. However, it is not always easy to work out how to use it to its full potential, which is either a charming part of its mystery or frustrating, depending on the kind of person you are.

The first one is an overview of the app that provides a demonstration of how it works and covers installation and set-up.

The second one shows you how to navigate files and folders, how to move and delete files with Quicksilver, how to send attachments and emails through Mail.app and how to use Quicksilver to append text to files.

The third covers using the clipboard and shelf and how to set up triggers, including a trigger to email the currently selected item (file, image, whatever).

If Mail hadn’t already made me deliriously happy, Quicksilver would. It’s my second favourite Mac app.

These videos repay the time it takes to watch them. Old timers may pick up a trick or two; newcomers will find these screencasts an excellent way in.

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